The efficient production of bioactive proteins and peptides has become a hallmark of the biomedical and industrial biochemical industry. Bioactive peptides and proteins are used as curative agents in a variety of diseases such as diabetes (insulin), viral infections and leukemia (interferon), diseases of the immune system (interleukins), and red blood cell deficiencies (erythropoietin) to name a few. Additionally, large quantities of proteins and peptides are needed for various industrial applications including, for example, the pulp and paper and pulp industries, textiles, food industries, sugar refining, wastewater treatment, production of alcoholic beverages and as catalysts for the generation of new pharmaceuticals.
With the advent of the discovery and implementation of combinatorial peptide screening technologies such as bacterial display (Kemp, D. J.; Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 78(7): 4520-4524 (1981); yeast display (Chien et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 88(21): 9578-82 (1991)), combinatorial solid phase peptide synthesis (U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,449,754, 5,480,971, 5,585,275, 5,639,603), and phage display technology (U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,223,409, 5,403,484, 5,571,698, 5,837,500) new applications for peptides having specific binding affinities have been developed. In particular, peptides are being looked to as linkers in biomedical fields for the attachment of diagnostic and pharmaceutical agents to surfaces (see Grinstaff et al, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0185870 and Linter in U.S. Pat. No. 6,620,419), as well as in the personal care industry for the attachment of benefit agents to body surfaces such as hair and skin (see commonly owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/935,642, and Janssen et al. U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0152976), and in the printing industry for the attachment of pigments to print media (see commonly owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/935,254).
In some cases commercially useful proteins and peptides may be synthetically generated or isolated from natural sources. However, these methods are often expensive, time consuming and characterized by limited production capacity. The preferred method of protein and peptide production is through the fermentation of recombinantly constructed organisms, engineered to over-express the protein or peptide of interest. Although preferable to synthesis or isolation, recombinant expression of peptides has a number of obstacles to be overcome in order to be a cost-effective means of production. For example, peptides (and in particular short peptides) produced in a cellular environment are susceptible to degradation from the action of native cellular proteases. Additionally, purification can be difficult, resulting in poor yields depending on the nature of the protein or peptide of interest.
One means to mitigate the above difficulties is the use the genetic chimera for protein and peptide expression. A chimeric protein or “fusion protein” is a polypeptide comprising at least one portion of the desired protein product fused to at least one portion comprising a peptide tag. The peptide tag may be used to assist protein folding, assist post expression purification, protect the protein from the action of degradative enzymes, and/or assist the protein in passing through the cell membrane.
In many cases it is useful to express a protein or peptide in insoluble form, particularly when the peptide of interest is rather short, normally soluble, and subject to proteolytic degradation within the host cell. Production of the peptide in insoluble form both facilitates simple recovery and protects the peptide from the undesirable proteolytic degradation. One means to produce the peptide in insoluble form is to recombinantly produce the peptide as part of an insoluble fusion protein by including in the fusion construct at least one peptide tag (i.e., an inclusion body tag) that induces inclusion body formation. Typically, the fusion protein is designed to include at least one cleavable peptide linker so that the peptide of interest can be subsequently recovered from the fusion protein. The fusion protein may be designed to include a plurality of inclusion body tags, cleavable peptide linkers, and regions encoding the peptide of interest.
Fusion proteins comprising a carrier protein tag that facilitates the expression of insoluble proteins are well known in the art. Typically, the tag portion of the chimeric or fusion protein is large, increasing the likelihood that the fusion protein will be insoluble. Example of large peptide tags typically used include, but are not limited to chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (Dykes et al., Eur. J. Biochem., 174:411 (1988), β-galactosidase (Schellenberger et al., Int. J. Peptide Protein Res., 41:326 (1993); Shen et al., Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 281:4627 (1984); and Kempe et al., Gene, 39:239 (1985)), glutathione-S-transferase (Ray et al., Bio/Technology, 11:64 (1993) and Hancock et al. (WO94/04688)), the N-terminus of L-ribulokinase (U.S. Pat. No. 5,206,154 and Lai et al., Antimicrob. Agents & Chemo., 37:1614 (1993), bacteriophage T4 gp55 protein (Gramm et al., Bio/Technology, 12:1017 (1994), bacterial ketosteroid isomerase protein (Kuliopulos et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 116:4599 (1994), ubiquitin (Pilon et al., Biotechnol. Prog., 13:374-79 (1997), bovine prochymosin (Haught et al., Biotechnol. Bioengineer. 57:55-61 (1998), and bactericidal/permeability-increasing protein (“BPI”; Better, M. D. and Gavit, P D., U.S. Pat. No. 6,242,219). The art is replete with specific examples of this technology, see for example U.S. Pat. No. 6,613,548, describing fusion protein of proteinaceous tag and a soluble protein and subsequent purification from cell lysate; U.S. Pat. No. 6,037,145, teaching a tag that protects the expressed chimeric protein from a specific protease; U.S. Pat. No. 5,648,244, teaching the synthesis of a fusion protein having a tag and a cleavable linker for facile purification of the desired protein; and U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,215,896; 5,302,526; 5,330,902; and US 2005221444, describing fusion tags containing amino acid compositions specifically designed to increase insolubility of the chimeric protein or peptide.
Cystatin, a ubiquitous protein inhibitor of cystein proteases and found in a variety of eukaryotic species, has also been used as a fusion protein tag for the recombinant expression of various proteins. For example JP 2006006242 discloses the use of human cystatin for the expression of human amelogenin and Kuehnel et al., (Protein Engineering, 16(10), 777-783 (2003)), discuss the use of cystatin as a component in a soluble fusion protein expressed in E. coli. None of the reported fusion proteins made with cystatin demonstrate the use of only a portion of the protein, rather the entire cystatin protein was used.
Although the above methods are useful for the expression of fusion proteins, they often incorporate large fusion tags that decrease the potential yield of desired peptide of interest. This is particularly problematic in situations where the desired protein or peptide is small. In such situations it is advantageous to use a small fusion tag to maximized yield.
There remains a need therefore for peptide fusion tags that facilitate the insolubility of fusion proteins where the peptide of interest is small and appreciably soluble in the host cell.